How to Win Political Debates with Data Visualization

by Marketing Team BIME, Manager, We Are CloudThursday, October 21, 2010

This article probably won’t help you reach Obama’s level, but perhaps will give you some idea how data visualization, among other tools, helped him get there. Every day new federal and local bills are being proposed and discussed in countries all over the world. The parties involved, more often than not, rely on statistics, cold hard facts and figures, to convince the people to support their stance.

It’s relatively safe to say that citing numbers, facts, statistics (anticipated cost, how much tax you will save as an individual, how many jobs will be created) adds credibility and weight to an argument. However, lack of surrounding background information and a poorly demonstrated context, can leave listeners or readers somewhat confused. In some cases, the introduction of figures to a debate can do more harm than good, if the subject matter is already complicated enough to understand.

One way to try and avoid this confusion is through the use of good data visualization. A well-presented chart can be a hundred times more effective than a list of numbers at putting a message across, and often much easier for people to process, spot trends and generally understand.

But the data visualization on its own is not sufficient, (we are speaking particularly about political arguments here). Normally accompanied by a coordinated multi-channel approach, that promotes comprehension as well as distribution of the information, data visualization in politics can be the difference between winning a vote and not!

Now time for some examples. This multi-channel approach was recently employed by Organizing for America’s (OFA) in its efforts to build up support for President Obama around the one-year anniversary of his $787 billion plans to combat national unemployment.

While the Republicans were busy pointing out that the country’s national unemployment rate was almost at 10% of the population as proof that the stimulus had failed to create employment opportunities and revive the economy, OFA – an arm of the Democratic National Committee – launched a coordinated campaign to persuade Americans that President Obama’s administration had put the country back on a “Road to Recovery”.

Here you can see the visualization that they used to present the proof to the public:

The chart shows US job loss figures between December 2007 and January 2010. This enabled people to compare the number of jobs lost during President Obama’s first year in office with the number of jobs lost during President Bush’s last year in office.

Discussion:

Ayush Yash Shrestha said:

While the graphic you've shown indicates the positive strides the Obama administration has made, at the end of the the day the electorate still gave the democrats a hiding during the recent mid-term elections.

Voltaire once quipped that "a witty saying proves nothing." In the data visualization paradigm I think we can say that "a clever visualization proves/means/guarantees nothing."